Apple‘s recent purchase of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless may signify a much more significant shift in Apple’s business model than it would otherwise seem. So, why did Apple buy Quattro (Apple earlier sought to buy market-leader AdMob, but ceded the purchase to Google once the price became too rich)? Apple has always focused on [...]
Author Archives: Adam
Will Apple Bet the Farm on Quattro Wireless?
Posted in Strategy, Technology Tagged admob, advertising, Apple, Google, iphone, Mobile, quattro wireless 3 Comments
How Square is Building a Two-Market Platform One Market at a Time
The innovation in mobile is really getting exciting, especially as it relates to advertising and payments. My last post touched on this but I wanted to dig a little deeper. The experience of paying for things now, particularly face-to-face transactions, leaves a lot to be desired. When I frequent a local business, I’d like them [...]
Posted in Strategy, Technology 4 Comments
How Blippy Can Help Foursquare Monetize Check-Ins
Foursquare‘s great for a number of reasons. Like a lot of people, I use it to keep track of my friends when I’m going out, but it’s also a fun way to discover new restaurants and other spots based on friends’ check-ins. Since I go to great lengths to find awesome Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, [...]
Posted in Strategy, Technology Tagged Application programming interface, Facebook, Foursquare, Mobile, Social network, Yelp 0 Comments
Track Changes to Privacy Policies and Any Webpage with Google Reader
The Google Reader team recently announced that Reader now allows you to follow changes to any web page, even if that page doesn’t support RSS. I am a heavy Google Reader user (particularly on my iPhone) and this is a great tweak that has some interesting applications. For example, eBay sellers could subscribe to eBay’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Facebook, Google, GoogleReader, privacy, RSS, terms of service 2 Comments
Boxee Payments: Good for Content Owners, Competition for MSO’s and iTunes
Content owners aren’t the ones who need to be worried about Boxee Payments, it’s the MSO (cable), satellite, and fiber networks and online distribution platforms such as iTunes, XBox Live, and Netflix (to the extent that Netflix sees itself as a platform). The reason for this is scarcity – plain old supply and demand (most [...]
Posted in Economics, Strategy Tagged Apple, Boxee, Comcast, iTunes, NBC Universal, Netflix, WiMax, Zach Klein 0 Comments
Go Into the Garage
I met with a VC named Jim Millar a number of years ago, and he made a great observation: If you want to be at the right place at the right time, you need to be in as many places at once as possible. It’s a twist on the “you make your own luck” adage, [...]
Owning Your Digital Self
Despite the power of new communication and publishing technologies, I’ve generally used these platforms to share things with relatively small groups of friends, family, and coworkers. I wanted to have some sort of privacy. The problem with that is digital media doesn’t lend itself to limitations on distribution. Plus, nobody has much control over what [...]
Posted in Personal 4 Comments
